Question of the Day - 01 May 2025

We've heard this rumor, which seems to have started in a Facebook post and has spread on social media, especially Instagram, from there. As far as we can tell, it's a pretty good hoax that looks to us like it was invented out of whole cloth by some AI platform, possibly on the 1st of last month.

Here are the details we've seen. 

Luxor’s pyramid and Excalibur’s castle were deemed “architecturally outdated” and “inefficient for modern tourism,” according to anonymous sources close to the project. Thus, the Halo project has been secretly in the works since 2023, with major investors from the Middle East and Silicon Valley.

Halo will feature two 85-story gold-and-glass towers with a rooftop "casino in the clouds" 1,000 feet above the Strip. It's scheduled to open in 2029, but private previews for high-tier members are expected as early as summer 2028 to coincide with the opening of the Las Vegas A's stadium.

That's the size of it this latest rumor, one in a long line of them. We don't know where it comes from or why it continues to circulate, but we get this question from time to time. 

Not only have we never heard a peep out of MGM Resorts that it intends to replace Luxor and Excalibur, but the company actually has a tentative plan for a possible new hotel tower on Excalibur's surplus land, currently occupied by surface parking. 

MRI has clearly done the arithmetic. As the closest Strip hotelier to Allegiant Stadium and the A's stadium if it's ever built, the company stands to benefit from having as much room inventory on tap as possible. Currently, among Mandalay Bay, Luxor, and Excalibur, rooms add up to around 11,600, not including Four Seasons. For MRI to even consider eliminating thousands of those contradicts every impulse a major corporation has when it comes to short-term "increasing shareholder value," to say nothing of the lip service it pays to "enhancing the guest experience."

But the Halo is a fine AI-created vision, if that's what it is. You can see the renderings in the first 25 seconds of a video produced by Total Vegas Buffets, which seems to have fallen hook, line, and sinker for the "announcement."